Together with Frismedia, we created a comprehensive digital platform for the Vrede van Utrecht (Treaty of Utrecht), a year round cultural fest, featuring a multitude of activities (ranging from theatre, festivals & art exhibitions to historic walking routes and cultural debates) in and around Utrecht. The goal of the platform was to bring together otherwise loosely coupled events and to encourage personal discovery of new events throughout the year. In order to do so, the platform stretches across multiple channels (web, mobile, mail) and offers relevant suggestions to individual users throughout the year based on their behavior.

My role in this project was two-fold, both offering strategic advice on the platform’s overall experience & architecture, as well as developing large parts of the API infrastructure that formed the foundation for the websites and mobile applications.

One of the platform’s key features is its capability to do cross-platform behavioral targeting and a relevance-based messenger. This allows for tailor-made communication according to the interactions and behavior of users, where messages are only delivered to users when relevant. By automating this process – calculating a message’s relevance on the fly based on its content and automatically delivering it to the appropriate users through the right channels – we were able to maximize the impact of the communication, while taking away a great deal of complexity at the same time.

First reviews have been very positive, with the renowned Dutch iPhoneclub even reviewing the iPhone app as  ’a textbook example for other festival apps’.